But What Do They Support?

UNTIL NOW, it was possible to hope that the damage caused by President Trump’s terrible incompetence, ignorance and impulsivity in foreign policy was largely theoretical, and possibly reparable. That is no longer true. The cost of his latest Syria blunder is unfolding before our eyes: Innocent lives lost. U.S. servicemen and -women betrayed. Butchering dictators emboldened. Dangerous terrorists set free. A ghastly scene is playing out, and it almost surely will get worse.

but they are remarkably shy about saying how they plan to avoid those problems. Rather than point out the many fallacies in the statement above, I’ll tell you what they want.

They want to occupy and colonize the Middle East permanently.

They are quick to make analogies with Germany and Japan, conveniently forgetting that we had conquered the Germans and Japanese and the Germans and Japanese aren’t shooting back. Quite to the contrary people in the Middle East are shooting back as well as setting IEDs to kill Americans.

They want to make the world safe for the Washington Post and the New York Times. Then the two newspapers will divide up the world and fight each other to the death to the last drop of our blood over their share of the readership.

The Washington Post has always been a neocon stronghold. I think that they support doing whatever Israel wants and/or converting every nation in the ME to a pro-West democracy.

But for the rest of us it isn’t that the Orange Man is Bad (apparently this is now the height of wit on the right) but that Orange Man was impulsive, undisciplined and showed no leadership. Suppose he had actually consulted with his staff and other parties ahead of time. Suppose the Kurds and Syrians had time to work things out and have troops in place before we left. Suppose that Trump had told Turkey ahead of time what sanctions would be imposed if they invaded. Maybe we end up the same place, who knows, but maybe we dont have to have dozens of dead people in Northern Syria for want of a little planning.

I think it would be instructive listening to the Rand Paul’s interview with Chuck Todd, who is a perfect surrogate for Steve’s “what if” post. Although, I rarely rely on Rand to make cogent foreign policy statements, he made far more sense, from a seemingly greater reservoir of knowledge and understanding of the region’s complexities, than his newsman counterpart.

If we stay forever I’ll guarantee plenty of other people will die.
Shall we invade China to save the Uighers and think we’ll have clean hands at the end?
We’re not the worlds policeman because it’s an impossible and ill defined role, we should stay out of other nations quarrels.

“The only way we can reduce the likelihood of those deaths ever occurring”

As I said, only the neocons think we are able to fix things over there and are willing to stay forever. The rest of us just think that if you are fighting along with someone in common cause, it wouldn’t hurt to make some minimal effort so that if you were fighting side by side on Monday, you leave on Tuesday, that you dont have the people you were fighting along with invaded on Wednesday. At least ask your staff and paid experts if there is anything you can do to minimize consequences.

As an aside, I have never been able to identify exactly what was the Kurdish area of Syria. By older maps it looks as though they really controlled a fairly small area in the northwest and a very small area in the mid north. It looks as though when they were fighting in Raqqa they were significantly outside of their area of control. It looks, AFAICT, that they had already regained control of areas they controlled before ISIS, but were fighting to eliminate ISIS either for revenge or so that they didnt come back.